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Lynx posted:Has anybody here tried Aliens Dark Descent? I know it's an RTS, but it seems like it might scratch that Xcom itch. I got it after watching the mandalore review, it's awesome, janky tho. I'd say it's more Xcom than rts, but one where you go into these large scale persistent dungeons. They nail the Aliens aesthetics and feel also. Hoping they can make more maps or missions later on.
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Jun 23, 2023 09:19
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Man I really got to finish an X-Com 2 campaign one of these days; I can't count the number of campaigns I've started and then got burnt out on around the midway point. It's silly, but I think a major barrier for me is aesthetic: I really like the design of the basic tier armour and weapons, but it really feels like you lose a lot of the rag-tag feel once you upgrade to intermediate stuff, and then it gets even worse when you hit the weirdly shiny exo suits. I get why the later armour needs to look more advanced, but I wish it could still communicate that its being built with scavenged materials instead of mass produced by industry.
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Jun 23, 2023 09:33
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Nono, you're totally right, the Tier3 aesthetic is nowhere near as cool at XCOM1's titan & archangel stuff. edit: Just looked it up, and drat, even the Tier2 stuff looks ways better. Shame. edit2: Know what would fix this? COSMETIC MODS.
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Jun 23, 2023 09:56
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Lynx posted:Has anybody here tried Aliens Dark Descent? I know it's an RTS, but it seems like it might scratch that Xcom itch. Played it for about 10 hours now, and echoing that it's basically real-time XCOM with persistent dungeons and some minor jank. The game really nails the tension of being deep into a mission with what seems like just one more thing to do, but all your guys are stressed-out wrecks and maybe you should just return to base and come back tomorrow to finish things up? One noticeable difference from XCOM is that you move the entire squad as one unit. Individual marines can separate from the squad if you give them an order to interact with a specific object in the world, but they will automatically return to the squad afterwards. Lessons learned that the tutorial didn't emphasise enough: Suppressive Fire (DD's version of Overwatch) is really crucial for dealing with attacking aliens, because it applies a huge movement speed debuff to them while they are in the cone of fire. The marine using Suppressive Fire can still move while maintaining it, as long as the point you targeted remains within line of sight. Without it, aliens will get up in your face before you can kill them and likely splash your guys with acid, injuring them. Rest early and rest often. Marines have a stress meter that goes from 0 to 100 as they are exposed to aliens, being hunted or engaged in fighting. If it reaches 100, it resets to 0 and the marine gets a trauma point and debuff that lasts for the mission. If a marine gets 3 trauma points, they get a permanent debuff that must be removed back at base, but takes them out of action for a while. The optimal method of dealing with this is to never let your marines reach 100 stress. You can rest anytime during a mission to reset the stress meter to 0 if you weld all the doors to a room shut, which expends a non-rare consumable for each door welded. Rooms with only one door are not hard to find. Effectively managing stress is the biggest determinator in how far into a mission you can get in a single day. Stealth is much more prevalent than in XCOM. You have a motion tracker that shows enemies in the vicinity of your squad and can hide behind terrain to break line of sight. Waiting for patrols or roaming aliens to pass or go away is often better than trying to fight them.
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Jun 23, 2023 10:01
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So its good? I was greedily eyeing that game up but i've been in a state of "open game, sigh, close game" for a couple weeks.
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Jun 23, 2023 10:19
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I think it's really good because it hones in on one core idea that really works, that is controlling a squad of marines from an APC like in Aliens. the Jim Cameron one. The jank and minor gripes I can live with it because the core stuff is really cool, plus the maps are hand designed and have cool environmental stuff.
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Jun 23, 2023 11:18
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Honest Thief posted:I think it's really good because it hones in on one core idea that really works, that is controlling a squad of marines from an APC like in Aliens. the Jim Cameron one. The jank and minor gripes I can live with it because the core stuff is really cool, plus the maps are hand designed and have cool environmental stuff. It gets a lot right but the base pulse rifle holds 100 bullets, so let that set your expectations.
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Jun 24, 2023 11:27
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I've picked up Chimera Squad because it was pretty cheao, and I've been hungering for some tactical game for a while. It's pretty fun, literally XCOM lite as advertised, and I kinda wish they did some DLC for it now.
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Jun 24, 2023 12:25
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The game was shoved out the door literally days before lockdown, I'm amazed there even where post-release patches. Also, ten bucks.
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Jun 24, 2023 12:37
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Vagabong posted:Man I really got to finish an X-Com 2 campaign one of these days; I can't count the number of campaigns I've started and then got burnt out on around the midway point. It's silly, but I think a major barrier for me is aesthetic: I really like the design of the basic tier armour and weapons, but it really feels like you lose a lot of the rag-tag feel once you upgrade to intermediate stuff, and then it gets even worse when you hit the weirdly shiny exo suits. Yeah X-COM was extremely closely following the 1994 aesthetic of soldiers who looked like action hero figures from a sunday morning cartoon. X-COM2 on the other hand is just referencing X-COM. WOTC fixes this is a bit by adding the new classes that all look like they've popped out of a marvel film.
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Jun 24, 2023 12:47
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2/wotc was a huge visual downgrade for me for that reason lol.
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Jun 24, 2023 13:41
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Serephina posted:The game was shoved out the door literally days before lockdown, I'm amazed there even where post-release patches. Also, ten bucks. It also came out of loving nowhere, which was wild
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Jun 24, 2023 14:28
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I'm playing the legacy missions now and it's fun to imagine everyone on the Avenger making jacking off motions when Central talks about killing three Avatars with an alien katana on a dam 20 years ago.
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Jun 24, 2023 17:03
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bradford's big fish stories are the funniest thing in any xcom game in history
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Jun 24, 2023 17:21
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Alchenar posted:Yeah X-COM was extremely closely following the 1994 aesthetic of soldiers who looked like action hero figures from a sunday morning cartoon. X-COM2 on the other hand is just referencing X-COM. WOTC fixes this is a bit by adding the new classes that all look like they've popped out of a marvel film. The problem is that the lower tier of xcom 2 armor is very much the same, just with 80s punk poo poo. Especially if you include the resistance warrior stuff. The exo suit is this goofy rear end heavy armor that looks like a bunch of scrap melded together. The upper tier armors dont just fail at being goofy. They also completely clash with the aesthetic of tier 1. Imagine if they had made armors that had all that stolen tech bolted in increasingly comical ways as you teched up until your forces looked like mad max cars with plasma tubes mixed in with the spikes all over.
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Jun 24, 2023 22:45
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I sidestep the issue with Titanfall Pilot Armor cosmetic mods every time
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Jun 24, 2023 22:53
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The problem is that you aren't actually renegade scavengers, you are an elite strike force knocking about on a converted alien ship and the thing about all your tier 2 and 3 kit is that it is brand new.
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Jun 24, 2023 23:05
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I do really appreciate that despite being in the future, the tech in XCOM 2 isn't superior to XCOM 1. Yes they've had twenty years of experience with alien technology, but they don't have the resources of the entire planet thrown making cool stuff. Laser weapons just flat out don't exist because it's not alien tech and no one on earth has been given the resources and budget to work on it. Sure they can make some pretty cool armour that's a huge step up on kevlar, but it's just not as good as what could've been made by an intact military industrial complex given alien alloys and elerium to play around with.
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Jun 24, 2023 23:49
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Alchenar posted:The problem is that you aren't actually renegade scavengers, you are an elite strike force knocking about on a converted alien ship and the thing about all your tier 2 and 3 kit is that it is brand new. You're an insurgent strike force driving around in a hot wired spaceship that so beat up that a lot of the early game economy is driven by engineers digging enough of the junk out of the way so that you can have room for the facilities you need. Many missions are quick attacks where you have to flee before a proper alien strike force arrives. And the vast majority of the remainder are you trying to grab resources that you desperately need and the aliens can scuttle at will. Making a tech breakthrough and now all of your gear is sparkly and newly produced is a pretty big tonal shift away from what the developers themselves said they were going for and otherwise delivered.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:01
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Mechanically and in terms of UI/quality of life, XCOM2 is superior to XCOM1 and I love playing it for that reason. The stealth stuff is fun too. But narratively and flavor wise, XCOM1 is just so much more fun. Learning about the aliens, capturing them, shooting down and reverse engineering UFO's and general tech... it's wonderful. Is there a mod that just uses XCOM2's UI and QoL changes pasted over XCOM1?
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Jun 25, 2023 00:13
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Even tier 2 has enough jank that you can imagine that some of it is cobbled together, but tier 3 is definitely leaning into the high tech power suit too much. There's some very clear 'base cosmetic inspired' mods that go with a matte texture more than a shiny one and to my mind they definitely feel less jarring. They still look like new tech manufactured, but they're more on the lines of 'we are now using what XCOM would have come up with as a conventional military suit for anti-alien fighting' than the shiny and sleek look.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:15
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JosefStalinator posted:Mechanically and in terms of UI/quality of life, XCOM2 is superior to XCOM1 and I love playing it for that reason. The stealth stuff is fun too. I agree completely about the UI improvements in xcom2, which is why it's so hard to go back to xcom1. It would be pretty fun to try a mod that combines the two into xcom1 story with xcom2 QoL.
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Jun 25, 2023 02:05
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JosefStalinator posted:Mechanically and in terms of UI/quality of life, XCOM2 is superior to XCOM1 and I love playing it for that reason. The stealth stuff is fun too. Agree on all that. Also, I love having an underground base. I don’t know why but I love it.
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Jun 25, 2023 05:50
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Shyrka posted:I do really appreciate that despite being in the future, the tech in XCOM 2 isn't superior to XCOM 1. Gauss weapons are from Terror from the Deep. There's a lot of little bits of XCOM 2 that are nice little nods to that game, right down to the final base being at the bottom of the ocean.
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Jun 25, 2023 09:03
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Alchenar posted:Gauss weapons are from Terror from the Deep. There's a lot of little bits of XCOM 2 that are nice little nods to that game, right down to the final base being at the bottom of the ocean. I forget if it was XCOM 1 or 2, but Central making a crack about chrysallids during a mission and saying “thankfully they aren’t on a cruise ship” made me  and brought me straight back to hunting for lobstermen and triscenes in random cruise ship closets in TFTD.
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Jun 25, 2023 19:31
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Unfortunately, the most committed X-Com experience to the renegade scavenger vibe is the openxcom mod with tits in it. XCOM 2 ain't really it.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:25
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Icon Of Sin posted:I forget if it was XCOM 1 or 2, but Central making a crack about chrysallids during a mission and saying “thankfully they aren’t on a cruise ship” made me It was the newfoundland mission ew added when you find their nest on a freighter.
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Jun 25, 2023 23:39
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FoolyCharged posted:It was the newfoundland mission ew added when you find their nest on a freighter. Oh right, the ship at the far side of the map. 
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Jun 26, 2023 00:47
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I don't mind the sleek hi-tech futurearnours in 2. My head canon tells me that st the point they've got decent enough 3d printers, and they are no longer simply gluing stolen bits of Advent tech together.
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Jun 26, 2023 06:05
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How are people finding that aliens game? Looks good
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Jun 26, 2023 07:33
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Dongicus posted:How are people finding that aliens game? Looks good It's fun, but has some rough edges. Fortunately it seems that the dev team aims to be responsive to these issues. They hotfixed a couple of low-hanging fruits already (certain voiceovers being repeated too often to the point of annoynace), and are expecting to put out a patch with more fixes this week. If your tolerance for jank is low, give it a week or two before you try the game maybe.
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Jun 26, 2023 07:50
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I hope they add an expantion pack or whatever the new kids are calling those these days, cause a couple more special alien types and two more maps would rule
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Jun 26, 2023 08:47
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Slashrat posted:It's fun, but has some rough edges. Fortunately it seems that the dev team aims to be responsive to these issues. They hotfixed a couple of low-hanging fruits already (certain voiceovers being repeated too often to the point of annoynace), and are expecting to put out a patch with more fixes this week. I don't even know if i'd call it jank. I've literally got two problems, that one marine voiceline of "i think we've been spotted!" when you hear the motion tracker go off should straight up be removed, its a dumb line. The other is that occasionally my soldier will get stuck on a corner. This happened twice over six hours and both times i just moved my squad back and they unstuck themselves. The rest of the game, not had a single problem. It's the cleanest release i've played in years. E: Actually, two more bits of jank. If your squad lays down fire in the path of an enemy but isn't spotted, they'll just walk into it and die without triggering an alert. The enemies also don't understand that the APC exists and will happily just walk in their standard patrol form while it murders them. I think this is probably for the best though, the APC triggering alerts would be a massive pain. dogstile fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 10:52
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Icon Of Sin posted:I forget if it was XCOM 1 or 2, but Central making a crack about chrysallids during a mission and saying “thankfully they aren’t on a cruise ship” made me
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Jun 26, 2023 17:46
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Lynx posted:Has anybody here tried Aliens Dark Descent? I know it's an RTS, but it seems like it might scratch that Xcom itch. Yes, great fun. It is 'simple' compared to xcom, it has the base feature but you don't get to expand it, it has research but it is basic and not a choice of what you'll research, just when you can do it. It has an barracks which is like xcom where you can customize your dudes and put them in training and choose abilities and gear, while the medical room is basic, it's xcom lite, but because it has no grid system and is real time, it's really fun and different enough. Amazing visuals and atmosphere, the only downside to the game is that this game should have been called Aliens: Colonial Marines, instead of the unfinished buggy FPS from a few years ago. It would have been a much more fitting name. A couple of screenshots of mine:   Kill it with fire  Marine, are you forklift certified?  Snipers getting cloaks and hoods is amazing, also due to massive injuries in previous missions both recons have amputations and robot limbs which owns  Okay sorry for spamming the xcom thread, but it's a fun game, wishlist it and grab it on sale in a few months if nothing else. I saw the trailer at not-E3 the other week and it looked alright, then suddenly the game was out like 3 days later, before i had been able to look into it I saw Rimmy playing it, watched the first 15 minutes and bought it immediately, he wasn't even done with the tutorial and I was hooked. Here's his video of the start of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwXFhZlXgKY drunkill fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jun 28, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 15:55
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I've officially started the doomsday clock and my only complaint is that i can't go back + kick up the difficulty without going through the forced tutorial. I hope they axe that. Medium is really easy. I am enjoying that when you hit hard alien aggressiveness, the game warns you. It is not joking. I got hit with a miniboss and enough aliens to drain most of my ammo + sentry guns. E: Also for anyone picking this up, your guys can level up multiple times on one outing. dogstile fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 28, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 16:52
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Not to hijack the thread, but what's the general opinion on Phoenix Point? I'm expecting it to go on sale tomorrow on Steam (like just about everything else), and I figured that this would be a good place to get a general consensus.
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Jun 28, 2023 18:37
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Zerbin7 posted:Not to hijack the thread, but what's the general opinion on Phoenix Point? I'm expecting it to go on sale tomorrow on Steam (like just about everything else), and I figured that this would be a good place to get a general consensus. I'm curious about this too!
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Jun 28, 2023 18:41
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Lynx posted:Has anybody here tried Aliens Dark Descent? I know it's an RTS, but it seems like it might scratch that Xcom itch. Echoing the above, it scratches the XCOM itch pretty well. Think like if XCOM and a dungeon crawler like Diablo/Diablo 2 had a kid that went off to join the colonial marines, and you’re not too far off.
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Jun 28, 2023 21:03
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I don't have nearly the hours into Phoenix Point as I do XCOM, but I would say it's definitely worth picking up. Especially on sale.
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